call it home

get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

where you once belonged? i think i always belonged everywhere. consider it my current and future address. hard to find? maybe. the only way to live? definitely.

in a week, i will be back in california. we're gonna talk about california, not the states, not amriika, as they say here. when people ask where im from, i never say anything but california.

in 1 week, i will have to remind myself to wear a seatbelt again. ill get to flush toilet paper in a toilet, ill get to lose miserably as usual to my siblings at guitar hero, ill get to eat nachos and cheezits and maybe even have a starbucks if i feel like it. ill get to wear tank tops and shorts, and flip flops every day. ill get to skateboard everywhere again, unless i feel like driving (someone else's car, haha). ill get to annoy my parents by sleeping til 12, ill get to work out and go running and ill get to look at all the clothes i forgot about and then just decide to wear a swimsuit instead. ill get to call a soda a soda and not a "beebsee" (pepsi, get it? why do they all drink that here?), ill get to play a piano whenever i feel like it, and do nothing if i feel like it. ill get to drink tap water with ice, smell garlic in the morning all the way from gilroy, and there will be such a thing in my universe as a non-smoking area. ill get to eat obnoxious amounts of avocados and go to coffee with people who may or may not really want to see me, but ive dragged them out anyway. there will be roads with lanes, which people can at least choose to use if they wish, ill get to walk places and not take a taxi everywhere, and my talent for telling whether the car behind me is honking because its a taxi wondering WHY ON EARTH ANYONE WOULD BE WALKING WHEN THEY COULD BE SITTING or whether its a random car full of men who are going to throw phone numbers at me will no longer be a useful skill. i wont buy phone cards, and maybe if i ask nice someone else will make me a dinner that's something i recognize. ill get to eat chinese food and listen to the music i missed and complain about the radio thats still playing everything its been playing since i was in 11th grade. phone calls wont cost an arm and a leg, or maybe they will because i have a tendency to make the impossible happen when it comes to phone bill numbers. and ill have the internet without having to go to a cafe and buy a drink, and my hair color will be almost normal, and people wont stare at me on the street any more than they stare at anyone else. well maybe thats not true, but we can dream, cant we? ill get to live like a normal person who lives in their country, not a foreigner who is exhaustingly fascinating to everyone on the street/in the room/ in the building.

there are things i will miss, millions of things. shirts like "redundant... don't ask me to do a damn thing" and "yes... i... do." and "ok! i would like that!" (... what does that even mean?). and everyone i meet wont be named ahmed, and it wont be normal for me to offer everyone i see tea or turkish coffee, and no one will understand me when i say hiloo ktir, and ill have to speak effing english all the time. god im sick of that language. and i wont be able to get "juice" meaning actually just a fruit put in a blender and then into a cup. and ill miss mint lemonade, and taxi drivers who love my bad arabic, and everywhere i look wont be white stone buildings. and ill miss stupidly constructed and subsequently half-demolished sidewalks with giant trees in the middle of them making them completely irrelevant in the first place. and ill miss asking for directions and having someone take my hand and pull me wherever they think i need to go, go all the way there with me, and when they find they've misunderstood me, go with me to find someone else who will join our posse of me simply trying to find some cafe. and ill miss yalla bye, and argileh (god), and oppressively hot jordanian sun, and the call to prayer how will i live without you? and that smile that i get when i realize that the beatles really are universal- it doesnt matter where i am when they grace my ipod with their presence, it's always, always good.

we had a talk yesterday (after i left the ER haha) at school, some sort of re-orientation to america thing. and it was all really obvious, and i really dont think ill have a problem with it. i mean, if anything, i think too much, i process too fast- the states will not be a shock for me, i dont think. and i have a different feeling than i did when leaving dc, or paris... i think im ready to go home for a while. not a long while, mind you. i need to be here, i need morocco, and i need beirut, and i need to go back to palestine and syria and everywhere i love here. but i've been thinking about it, and i really think, this time, that im ready to go. i dont think ive felt like i wanted to go home all year, really, not for a long time. but its been a long time, a long way in my head and on the ground, and its time.

now that she's back in the atmosphere, with drops of jupiter in her hair.

ladies and gentlemen, she may just be coming down soon. and i dont know what ill do, really, coming "back" will be just as big an adventure as it ever was to leave. my spiderwebs link me now, pull me back here. i have long, long ties. and there will be winds i cant refuse, that will bring my heart back, if nothing else. honking cars and girls in hijab and pepsi and tea and boys on the street who say "nice", and ill hear in my head "hello i love you welcome to jordan". and everything makes you smile. everything makes me smile.

living here does that to you. everything is mish mushkila, no problem. everything is just the way it is. and traffic makes me smile, and bad english makes me smile, and people spitting on me makes me smile. living in jordan is like riding a camel; you just have to relax your hips into it and ride it out, let it do its thing.

its perfect for me; thats how i live anyway. but it will be nice, for a little while, to live somewhere thats not a rollercoaster, where i know how im getting to school regardless of the weather, and there are no doomstairs to climb, and i know what im eating at least half the time.





and they will see us waving from such great heights, and they've stopped a long time ago telling me to come down now. maybe thats why i feel like its time, i dont know. and its unexpected, and its strange and pretty, but i really, really, really do.


Sugarcane in the easy mornin'
Weathervanes my one and lonely

The ink is running toward the page
It's chasin' off the days
Look back at boat feet
And that winding knee
I missed your skin when you were east
You clicked your heels and wished for me

Through playful lips made of yarn
That fragile Capricorn
Unraveled words like moths upon old scarves
I know the world's a broken bone
But melt your headaches, call it home

love story

this is a paper, written in response to leila aboulela's the translator. my professor apparently liked it so much she read it aloud to my class. so i figured since half the world has alread heard it i might as well put it up here.



The translator, they call her. And what does she translate? Arabic into English, home into exile, love into guilt. She is a wanderer trapped in a series of exiles, prisons of guilt wherever she is.

I found the book strange, the characters different than the usual. There were no abusive fathers, no raging husbands, only Sammar and her guilt, of a husband whose death is somehow her fault and a son she can't love because of the pain he brings her.

This is a love story, of a woman who falls in love with a foreigner, in a time and place where she is a foreigner. In a sort of guilty, naive way, I loved that it was happy, that they ended up together. I read those pages time after time. But more than a love story, it was a story of religion, of rules and cultures and lines in the sand. I don't understand the end, I don't understand Rae's sudden conversion... it didn't make sense to me. It would have made sense to me that he converted for her, because he loved her, but it seemed like he was serious about it. And i didn't believe him. I was conflicted- wanting desperately for them to be together, for a happy ending just this once, but also wanting them to rebel, wanting them to break the mold of their cultures and love each other anyway. I wanted her to love him regardless, to accept him with his doubts and his thoughts and his wonderings. I wanted him to refuse the black and white terms of her question, to tell her that he was searching for god and for truth and that he loved her, and that that should be enough. I wanted that to be enough. I wanted their relationship to be love and truth and acceptance and mistakes and doubts, something human. And his conversion, her insistence upon it, his bending to her, seemed unreal to me, fake.

And I wish, in Islam, as I wish in all religions, that we could accept each other, and our questions and our doubts and our wanderings. I wish that religion would let us be human, with mistakes, with forgiveness, with trial and error, with searching. I wish the terms didn't have to be so black and white, heaven and hell, saved or not. People are complex, people are piles of questions, I don’t think I could ever explain what it is to be human in words. And how, how do we presume to describe any sort of real or imagined god, with our language, in our words, how do we presume to think that any god worth thinking about could ever fit in a book? I didn't want Rae to convert, I didn't want Sammar to back down on her principles, I wanted them to form a new religion, their own religion, a human religion—of everything they both clearly believe in, without a name. I am tired of everything having a name.

I feel like I shouldn’t be writing this. It is her religion, now their religion, and I have no right to question it, but this is how I feel. There are so many lines, so many boxes and we are all stored in an attic, in the box labeled Muslim or Christian or whatever else we call ourselves. And it’s not my place to say that any of that is wrong, I would never presume to do so. But I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that we fit into boxes, and I don’t believe that God does. And I understand Sammar; I understand devotion and I understand her religious and cultural principles. But I don’t understand the labels, the ultimatums, the black and white of it all. All she requires of him is that he takes her label, her name—can’t he believe in the principles that she does without having to say the same words in the same language that she does? That world is not my world; I guess it’s just something I have to accept.

I believe in things. I believe in right and wrong, I believe in choices. I just can’t believe that everything has to have a name.

meandering thoughts

a remembering people. spider-catching girl. shove me in the ocean, let me breathe like fishes do. breathe with me, like fishes do.

the city is covered, now, in a haze of white and heat. it quiets us, subdues the noise of our cars and our humming air conditioners. gives a sense of ending, of quiet apocalypse, as if we had built all we could build and then we fell asleep, leaving the rows of white stone buildings to entertain themselves without us.

i am unsatisfied with everything these days. missing something, wanting something, not ever knowing what. not ever guessing quite right. writing takes such effort now, it flows from my mind all the way to my wrists, stops before it ever reaches my fingertips, as if my veins had gotten tangled in a traffic jam and life only trickles out of them.

if i am home, i want to be out, if i am out, i want to be at home, usually laying on the floor rolling about. i want everything. to eat and to not eat, to write and not to write... i dont know. and i can't believe im leaving this place- forever it seems, even if i come back, but i am glad to be going home, i think. i am everything at once about leaving, happy and sad and worried and confused, but mostly just in denial.

let's go write about adoption in islam. that should be fun. :D

alleluia boy, bridges and unfolding cranes

we are back. here again, and invincible again, and the words just never come fast enough.

it occurred to her, it occurs to me, that everything is beautiful. talks of god and mind and body and how there's no such thing as a line between them. there's no such thing as lines. i want to read big books and think big thoughts, i want to think things bigger than thoughts. fill me up, breathe me in, lift up inside me until i expand and float away like a hot air balloon. smoke me out, fill me up with apple and lemon juice until i'm too big to fit on the ground anymore. there's not enough earth to hold all of me. never enough sea to sail.

and i look out the secondfloor window, there's a boy on the street. i love that boy, i wonder what his name is. i wonder how we all manage to be human at once. full of pretty toxins, we all are. sunrise prayers and walking contradictions. big thoughts, too big to be called anything but god, like watching a paper crane unfold itself and seeing the creases.

nostalgia for nostalgia, broken things that are happiest that way. burnt bridges only make it that more important that i swim across to see you. it's hot out, i could go for a swim.

live me love me leave me breathe me afraid is nothing we are atoms. and the tiny space between them, whirling around like wind without a voice. whispers of old things.

alleluia boy, a symphony of feeling. never, ever leave me, little song.

if life was a coloring book

we write because we have to, because words are what we are. and i have nothing to write, but i have bubbling, bubbling, toiling troubling thoughts that have no words today.

to be alone with you. oh, sufjan.

and i think that maybe the reason there is so much judgment here, so many uncrossable lines, is that there is no forgiveness. there is love, so so much love, and all of it conditional. you can't have forgiveness if your honor is your life, if reputation is all you are. and you don't need forgiveness if you kill anyone who steps on the borders of your family's reputation.

i've been trying to research this, trying to figure out why my birth and my family and my life are so immutably unacceptable here. but what am i supposed to do, google "arab culture obsession with bloodlines"? trust me, none of the results are helpful. all i get is geneology websites and dating site offers. find an arab husband in minutes? no thanks.

but it makes sense i guess. i am impossible here. my situation, my life, is unforgivable, and if it cannot be forgiven it does not exist. it's like a coloring book where you color everything inside the lines and then cut out the picture- every little red and purple crayon mark outside the thick black lines is lost. we are so zero sum, so black and white, that we can't accept anything out of the ordinary. so of course, i am illegitimate. because if it doesn't fit into our idea of "how life should be" and "how women should be" and "how a family should be", it is wrong. there is no should be, here. there is only what is.

and i love this place, i love it to the moon and back. which is pretty far seeing as how i'd have to hold my breath the whole time. but i wish we could forgive, and forget, and call things mistakes, and have regrets, and accept each other with all our faults, without some pretense of what we should be. we are what we are.

it just seems so unfair, that with everything that i disagree with, i accept this culture. but it can't accept me. there is no agree to disagree in any head but mine.